Zite Doctors Up the iPad for Multiple Personalities

When I first bought my iPad, I thought it would be a household device, but by the time I had my Twitter push notifications and my Angry Birds high scores up and running, it was pretty clear who it belonged to.

So I was interested to see that personalized news reader app Zite today launched a new version that allows users to have multiple profiles.

CNN-owned Zite justified its new “Sybil” features with a survey in which one third of iPad-owning respondents said they shared their devices. (The research was conducted as a poll on Ask Your Target Market with 330 participants.)

Support for multiple users seems particularly helpful for an app like Zite, which learns over time what kind of stories each user is likely to enjoy. Of course it might be even better if Apple offered a multiple user feature on the iPad as it does on other devices.

Various developers havereleased and mocked up multi-user tools for the iPad. Berg London designer Matt Jones wrote last year, “The individual nature of the UI and user-model of the iPad seems so at odds to me with its form-factor, the share-ability of its screen technology and its emergent context of use.”

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